So what happened with Kinja is pretty interesting. When Dick Nenton first launched development on Kinja Platform, he had most of the work designed in the new York office by a small handful of designers and implemented in eastern europe.
The long and short of it is that when Gizmodo and Kinja got snapped up by Univision, the NYC team started to leave and were replaced by newer understudies. The Univision sold it to Jim Spanfeller, who personally bullied a number of editors, support staff, the ads department, and the entire kinja NYC team.
Kinja Europe’s team is seemingly filled with workers who implement Spanfeller’s ideas on the worst possible way. Within the first month, the number of ads doubled. Autoplay video ads with sound, interstial ads, the whole lot. After the Deadspin staff all quit to form Defector, Spanfeller ordered the Kinja user blogs burned and most accounts associated with user blogs were banned. New account creation was disabled. I’m pretty sure Kinja Europe has just two staffers who operatethe servers with hand pumps.
Kinja platform will continue to get worst and worse because anyone who understands code is long gone.
